Your fault.
Guilt incinerated me. Made me yearn for those blank moments where I felt nothing at all. But Ranger was here. A reality I did not deserve any more than he deserved to be lied to.
I stared at a tiny thread in the leather seat closest to me. “There is a monster in me and I do not know how to kill it.”
“You’ve been clean for weeks. Just keep stabbing that fucker.”
“It is not me holding the knife.” I made myself face him. “Surely you must know that. Is why you arehere, no? To fight this for me?”
Ranger laughed. “Vik, I’m just an idiot waiting for you to turn that fucking sound system on, ready to catch you if you fall. You’re the one surviving this shit every day.”
“But that is my point. Before you came here, getting high was my first thought—my only thought until I got what I wanted, and it will be again when you’re gone. That is not me vanquishing anything. It is postponing the inevitable.”
Ranger had been irritable before we had left the house. But the flash in his eyes as he absorbed my words felt beyond that, and he shook his head, wild hair falling into his face. “Nothing’s inevitable. If it was, we’d have stayed together after that first time back home, and none of this horrible shit would’ve happened to you.”
Together. With him. I wondered who I would be if that dream had become a reality. But we were together now, and even without the devil in my veins, I was still the same broken person I had always been.
I still could not fuck him . . .
Could I?
I made a decision. “New deal.”
Ranger arched a dark brow, waving a hand for me to explain.
“Is simple.” I reached behind me and shut the chopper door. “You face your fears and I will face mine.”
[ 18 ]
RANGER
There was something in the water on this fucking island. There had to be. It was the only explanation for what sounded an awful lot like Viktor promising sex... stuff in exchange for me letting him take this thing up in the air while I was still in it. Heaven and hell served on a platter, with the added bonus of a morality kick to the dick.
You can’t let him do that.
The sex stuff. As if I would. And I opened my mouth to say so, but he moved past me to the front of the fuckinghelicopter, and I pretty much shat myself. Give me gangsters. Give me guns. Wire my balls to a fuse box. Anything but leaving the safety of solid ground in this shit can. “What are you doing?”
Viktor slid into a seat with a million buttons and some kind of stick. “Checking.”
“Checking what?”
His lips twitched like he wanted to say something hilarious, and in any other circumstance I’d have welcomed it. But nothing about this was funny. Nothing at all. My heart was in my fucking eardrums. I was basically already dead.
Why are you scared then?
I retreated to Lida, watching Vik as he examined every inch of the helicopter, inside and out. Calm. Methodical.Energised. He was so fucking hot, and I held on to that as I leaned into a quiet panic attack.
This is it for him. If you do this, he won’t go out and score.
Wishful thinking. And he hadn’t even lied about it. Instead, he’d reminded me that everythinguswas temporary, about six seconds after he’d almost told me he loved me.
Love. That word did a number on me as much as the thought of him taking this thing up in the air. Did I wish he’d said it? Would it have made any difference to the way I felt abouthim?
No. Cos you already love him.
True fucking story.
Viktor hopped back in the chopper. Dressed all in black, he was every wet dream I’d ever had. But it was more than the weight he’d put on over the past few weeks, the newfound colour in his cheeks, and the way his body was moving today. It was the spark in his eyes. The light—the sheer intelligence I’d never match.
